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I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

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Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#351

The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on t…

I hate that. It will also leave code comments explaining what it didn't do or what the code used to do and why it doesn't do that thing anymore. I don't have a huge global CLAUDE.md, but probably half of it is instructing it on how not to write irrelevant and verbose code comments.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#352

Claude models are the ones that need this the most and in my experience with this specific skill only maintain the conciseness for a few turns at most before they completely forget and are back to their unfathomable verbosity. That's with it instructed to use it in my sparse global CLAUDE.md and also manually repeating it regularly during sessions. I don't really want to install a hook that runs this on every single…

I got so angry at Fable's verbosity that I had a non-Anthropic model vibe-code a dedicated English linter. One that threw spaghetti at the wall in the form of combined Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, ARI and a whole pile of regexes and NLP as a fast Simple Technical English Gate. It also incorporates nicely into other agent projects, like for comment and README linting. So if it gets bad I simply tel…

This sounds amazing. Please share!

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#353
i am glad Astra seems yo recognise this type of stuff better and suggest alternatives or even measurements. i got in its instructions since forever that i will get overexcited about ideas and they might need more scrutiny than what i can give them. not sure if it has impact but i felt it was needed :p

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#356

The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on t…

It's been getting worse for months. I literally tweeted yesterday that Claude has ADHD and nothing I do will keep him focused. It's not entirely true though, I have found if I'm rude and mean it stays on track a lot better but I don't want to be rude and mean.

Me: I'm thinking about how to frob a knob using a mechanical arm attached to a raspberry pi. What IO does the raspberry pi have?

Claude: Five paragraphs about mechanical arm safety, electrical safety codes, the etymology of the word knob, and probably "I went ahead and wrote a proof of concept program to control mechanical actuators in Erlang."

Me: Did I ask for that?

Claude: "No. Here's a pinout of a raspberry pi."

I've taken to adding "focus on the question" to every prompt just to keep it on the road.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#358
post #89

> Install > Copy/paste into your CLI prompt: > Install the i-have-adhd skill/plugin from https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd , refer to the repo's AGENTS.md for instructions. This is a weird evolution from "don't copy-paste scripts that pipe curl into your shell interpreter" I know LLMs are getting better but I'd be at least a little nervous it could end up installing something from a squatted similarly-named githu…

[dead]

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#359
I have ADHD, and I approve this task's rules!

Side note, because I recently gave my AI the skill of speaking with proper 4th grade grammar, wherever that suffices, to reign in recent redundant, over complex, and indirect speech styles.

> 5. A rule fights the task. When a rule would delete the answer itself, the task wins; the shape stays. [...]

Unnecessary redundancy, "answer itself" -> "answer". (Pervasive "the X's own" and "the X itself" flourishes kill me.)

Unnecessary analogies, indirect reference, "rule fights", "the shape stays".

Unnecessarily split up sentences, the whole quote.

Unnecessary words, the whole quote.

My feedback would have been:

>> 5. When a rule interferes with a task, the task wins. [...]

(Not critiquing OP. But I just spent half a day correcting sentences exactly like this, to get the 4th Grade Grammar skill working properly and this sentence triggered me! Streams of sentences like that compound in communication complexity and ambiguity.)

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#360

The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on t…

reminds me of a line from The Green Pearl by Jack Vance. "If you please, I cannot properly answer negative questions. There are numberless acts which I have not performed; we could confer here forever while I detailed the deeds I have not done."
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